The Main Enemy by Milton Bearden (epub e reader txt) 📕

Now we were going to have to come to grips with what kind of game the KGB was playing. They had broken their cardinal rule: Never dangle KGB staff officers. We’d have to figure out what it meant for our other operations against them.

Berlin, August 1990

Interest in the Soviet MiG-29 pilot suddenly intensified in August, when the Iraqi Army of Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, setting the stage for war in the Persian Gulf.

Iraq’s Air Force was equipped with Soviet-built fighter jets, and its pilots had been trained by the Soviets. The Pentagon’s desire for more information about the MiG-29 was no longer academic.

The Soviet pilot upped the ante—he was photographing not only documents about the MiG-29’s design specifications, but also air combat tactical manuals, giving the U.S. Air Force timely insights into the methods the Soviets had taught the Iraqis.

As he was examining the Soviet pilot’s latest batch of photographs in early August, Rolph noticed that another pair of hands could be seen on the edges of some of the pictures. They appeared to be a woman’s hands, holding open the pages of the manuals as they were being photographed. Someone else obviously knew about the pilot’s espionage, and that was something he had never mentioned to the CIA. Who else was in the operation? At their next meeting in the Leipzig park, Rolph asked the Soviet about the hands on the pictures.

“That’s my wife,” he said. “I take the manuals home and she helps me photograph them.”

“So she knows what you’re doing?” Rolph’s mind was racing. He thought for a second and then said, “Why don’t you bring her to our next meeting?”

At their next scheduled meeting in the park, the pilot brought his wife for Rolph to meet. She was a lovely young brunette, and while they sat in the park, she convinced Rolph that she fully supported her husband’s decision to work for the CIA. She said that they were both eager to move to the West with their two young children, and she would help her husband commit espionage if that’s what it took to start a new life in America.

Langley, August 16, 1990

Sergei Papushin, who’d been picked up by the FBI after a drunken spree in New Jersey in late 1989, was still living in a CIA safe house, but interest in his case had gradually waned. Initially, the KGB had been so concerned about his defection that the Soviets had sent his father, the Rezident in Sofia, Bulgaria, to the United States to try to talk his son into returning home. But Papushin had stayed put. Now, nine months later, Papushin had been fully debriefed by the CIA and FBI, and it had become obvious that his knowledge of KGB counterintelligence operations against the United States was limited. He had worked in the unit that targeted British intelligence officers working in Moscow, so London had been interested in what he had to say. But he didn’t have much for us, and the tedium of day-to-day life as a talked-out defector was starting to get to Papushin. He’d turned again to heavy drinking.

The CIA had tried counseling, but he wasn’t much interested, and in the end he just settled into the routine of an on-again, off-again drunk, a former KGB officer who found himself of little value in his new setting.

During his sober moments, Papushin was clearly frustrated by the fact that he was largely being ignored by the CIA and FBI. So he did something he knew was guaranteed to once again grab attention: He gave one of his handlers an urgent message to be taken immediately to the top levels of the CIA. There is a mole in the agency, Papushin declared. The KGB has one of your people.

The CIA now gave Papushin their full attention and listened carefully to his story. He said that the KGB had a penetration of the CIA in Moscow. He had friends in the American Department of the Second Chief Directorate, and he’d overheard enough from his colleagues to conclude that they had an agent in the CIA station.

But as he was questioned further, it became apparent that he was scrambling with a fabricated story. Nothing he told his debriefers checked out, and eventually we concluded that he had come up with his story out of desperation. Another dead end in the search for an answer, any answer, to the problems five years earlier.

Warsaw, August 1990

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, a handful of CIA and American military officers stationed in Kuwait City were forced to move to Baghdad and into hiding without diplomatic immunity. With the very real possibility that the men could become hostages, the CIA began to look for help in arranging a rescue. After being turned down by other allies, the agency turned to the Poles.

General Henrik Jasik, Gromek Czempinski’s immediate chief in the foreign intelligence service, thought that any attempt at a rescue was too risky. There were still about four thousand Polish citizens in Iraq, and if Poland’s assistance to the CIA was exposed, they could be targeted by the Iraqi regime. But Czempinski realized that this was an opportunity for the Poles to prove to the CIA that they could become trusted partners and wanted badly to give it a try. Andrzej Milczanowski, the minister overseeing the intelligence service, overruled Jasik and approved the operation. But he decided not to inform his political superiors, including the prime minister, about the plan. He feared the operation might be vetoed, so he decided that he and Czempinski would sink or swim with the Americans.

By the end of August, the six Americans were still in Baghdad, staying in communication with Langley and a step ahead of Iraqi security. Warsaw and Langley were in constant contact, as Czempinski and his officers tried to figure out ways around the Iraqi domestic security apparatus, which was now assumed to be hunting for the Americans.

It wasn’t going to be easy.